Tag: Bookmarklets

Bloggers have this tendency of bookmarking webpages and saving Draftsfor later reading or writing. With time, these bookmarks grow and your entire bookmarks toolbar becomes unmanageable with too many links, you may have no idea about a bookmark which was saved two weeks ago.

If you are a die hard email person and want a simple way to manage content, links, to do lists and bookmarks from your email, here is a neat browser bookmarklet which might help.

Notesforlater is a brilliant web service which allows you to create a special bookmarklet for emailing links, content and anything else to your inbox. When you save a note using the bookmarklet, an email will be sent to your inbox containing the link to the webpage and the highlighted words. This is quite similar to Memonic – a web clipping tool which had reviewed earlier.

You can then use a special filter in your email inbox to sort and organize these notes, to do lists or links. Let’s take a look on how to setup Notesforlater.

How to Setup Notesforlater

1. First, go to the website and enter the email address where you want to receive your notes and links.

2. You will immediately receive an email from Notesforlater containing the link to your bookmarklet

3. Almost done now drag and drop the bookmarklet in your bookmarks toolbar.

Using Notesforlater to Email Links and Content to your inbox

When you are browsing a webpage and want to save it for later reading, just hit your customized Notesforlater bookmarklet. If you want to save only a few paragraphs and not the entire blog post, highlight the words and then click the bookmarklet.

This will immediately send an email to your inbox containing the link to the webpage and the highlighted paragraphs.

Now create a filter and assign a label to all incoming email from Notesforlater. This will sort your notes and keep them organized. At the end of the day, simply open the label and you can read the bookmarks or links saved earlier. Handy!

The advantage of using Notesforlater over browser bookmarks is that the later is browser dependent while the former isn’t. You may be using Google Chrome or Firefox it doesn’t matter because the bookmarks are saved directly in your email account.

Over the past few weeks Facebook, as well as its founder Mark Zuckerberg, has come under fire from all corners for lax privacy policies. Although, Facebook provides extensive privacy controls, making sense of it is not very simple. Worse still, some aspects like Instant Personalization are by default opt-in. As a result, many users might be caught unawares.

ReclaimPrivacy is a simple cross-browser bookmarklet, which enables you to assess your privacy settings. It scans your Facebook settings and displays a brief report (screenshot below) covering six major areas of concern including instant personalization and visibility level of personal information.

ReclaimPrivacy is a donation driven project started by Matt Pizzimenti. He hit upon the idea while on his flight back from Michigan to the Bay. The scanner doesn’t require Facebook username or password to work and operates entirely within the user’s browser. The source code for the project is available here.

Techie Buzz Verdict

In some ways, it is sad that the world’s largest social network needs a utility like ReclaimPrivacy. It also underscores the amount of distrust spreading among a section of Facebook users. While some pundits believe that most of the people are over reacting, there is no harm in being cautious.

ReclaimPrivacy is ideal for not-so-tech-savvy users as it enables them to make sense of the complicated and confusing Facebook privacy settings. Even better, it can instantly fix potentially troublesome settings. However, ReclaimPrivacy needs better documentation. In some cases it isn’t exactly clear what settings ReclaimPrivacy is changing.

Overall, ReclaimPrivacy is a really well executed idea. Spread the word and make your friends and family members aware of the potential privacy pitfalls of Facebook.

Quite sometime back I wrote and compiled a list of webmaster bookmarklets which would come in pretty handy to webmasters and anyone else who want to get more information about a site. Over a period of time I have created several more bookmarklets which have come in very handy.

Over a discussion at Twitter today, I came across a question about searching a site, and based on that I shared a bookmarklet which will allow users to search any website using the site operator in Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Searching with these bookmarklets is pretty easy. When you are on a site and want to search it for something, just click on the bookmarklet for the search engine you want to search content in. Once you do that, you will be prompted to enter the search term. Enter it and click on the Ok button to initiate the site search.

If you are interested, drag any of the links below to your bookmarks bar and click on it whenever you want to search content within a website.

We have already covered After the Deadline, the online service to check common mistakes in your writing. After the Deadline was recently acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

Now, After the Deadline has provided a bookmarklet which can easily check spelling mistakes, misused words, redundant phrases and grammar errors.

How to use After the Deadline Bookmarklet?

Drag the bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar from this page. As bookmarklets are the easiest extension to browser, you don’t need to do any special effort to use it. Whenever you need to check your writing, click the bookmarklet and it will load the After the Deadline checking button above every textbox on the web page. Click this button to check the errors.

Unfortunately, the bookmarklet does not work with Chrome browser. :( Also, it works only with textareas.

I wasn’t a bit surprised to find an answer at Marklets.com, one of my favorite spots to grab new bookmarklets. Bookmarklets will usually work in any modern web browser. If you don’t know what bookmarklets are, see this FAQ.

Drag the link above and drop it onto your web browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar, or right click and copy the address, then create a new bookmark. You can then move it to your bookmarks toolbar folder.

To use the Goo.gl bookmarklet, all you have to do is click the bookmarklet in your toolbar when you are at a page that you want to shorten the URL for. Here’s what you’ll see when you click the bookmarklet.

Techie Buzz Verdict:

This bookmarklet could use some work. It would be nice if there were an easier way to grab the short URL instead of highlighting and copying. I also have to question the use of Goo.gl for shortening website addresses. Currently, there are far better URL shortening services out there, such as bit.ly and others we’ve mentioned before.

Formerly known as readability2, Clippable is a useful browser bookmarklet that reduces all the clutter from a webpage and makes it more easier to read. If you often find websites with a large number of advertisements, banners or useless elements, then use this browser bookmarklet to get rid of the cluttered stuff.

Watch the following screen cast to understand how Clippable works:

As you can see, the bookmarklet removes everything from advertisements, widgets, buttons and all the unnecessary elements, thus giving you a distraction free reading environment.

To use Clippable, browse to this page and drag and drop the bookmarklet in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar.

Techie-Buzz Verdict

Clippable does exactly what is says. However, in some sites it does not exclude the retweet button if placed at the end of the post. Otherwise it removes the advertisements, banners, widgets and presents a distracting free reading environment.

While browsing multi page content on websites, you might have come across lengthy articles spread across multiple pages. Typically, list posts with a large number of items are distributed among different pages and you have to hit the “Next” link at the end of every item to read the next page. With Pagezipper, you can merge all the “Next” links of a post into one and read the entire article in one single page.

How to Install Pagezipper

Installing Pagezipper is easy and pretty straightforward. You can use the Pagezipper Firefox extension or drag and drop the Pagezipper bookmarklet in the bookmarks toolbar. If you are using Internet Explorer, right click the bookmarklet and select “Add to favorites”.

How to use Pagezipper

To understand how Pagezipper works, let’s take an example of a page which is distributed among multiple pages and contains a “Next” link at the bottom of each list entry. We will use a Google search result page to illustrate the example.

I did a search for the term “Techie-buzz” and was shown 120,000 results spread across 10 consecutive pages.

Now comes the real fun. I want to see all the search results in one single page and without having to click the “Next page” links placed all the way bottom. While on the search result page, just click the Pagezipper bookmarklet and it will automatically merge all the pages into one single page. When you scroll to the bottom of the page, the next page is added and you are given two buttons on the right top of the page. These buttons show you the count of which page you are in and how many pages you have browsed in the “group of pages”. Subsequent pages are added automatically once you scroll down. You can navigate between pages using hot keys too(control+up and control+down).

To see another example visit this blog post. It contains a series of 50 list entries distributed among 50 pages.

How Pagezipper can be useful

Pagezipper can be particularly useful when

You want to see all the search results of a particular query in one single page without having to load the next page.

You are reading a lengthy list post containing a large number of entries spread across multiple pages.

You are browsing an image gallery and want to see all the images at one place. Pagezipper can resize the image thumbnails and you can navigate between the different pages using the control+down, control+up arrow keys.

Techie Buzz Verdict

Pagezipper is cool and does what it says. The important thing is that it’s browser independant. So you can use it as a bookmarklet in Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. The only downside is that it may not work in some webpages where the “Next” link is loaded using Javascripts.

I use Google chrome extensively on a day to day basis for research, regular surfing and more. In addition to that I also make use of Google Talk for communicating with others and Google Tasks for taking important notes.

Being a webmaster myself I have been using several bookmarklets for managing and tracking things, here is a list of bookmarklets that I use on a day to day basis, many of them have been created by me as they were not available elsewhere.

These bookmarklets are specifically created for webmasters and range from useful Check Technorati Reactions- This bookmarklet will allow you to check the Technorati Rank for any website.

Google Chrome still does not have the ability to add a toolbar like Google Toolbar and any other one’s in fact, there are many people who use several toolbars to track SEO information like Page Rank and more.

The Distilled blog has come up with a list of interesting and useful bookmarks related to SEO for Google Chrome, that will help you perform several tasks like check page rank (which is a exclusive Techie Buzz tool), count number of links and so on.

The Google Chrome SEO Buttons Include

Count Links: displays the number of links on the current page (showing internal and external)

NoFollow Highlighter: adds a light red background to any NoFollow-ed links on the current page

Google Site: search: shows all indexed pages from this site

Google’s Cached Version: shows the cached version of the current page

Google PageRank: pops up a window showing the current page’s PageRank

SEO Playground Tool: opens a useful information pane by Dave Naylor

Y! Link Report for this Page: shows the Yahoo! SiteExplorer links for the current page

Y! Link Report for this Subdomain: as above, but for the whole site

WolframAlpha stats about this Page: may show some useful info about the current page

Twitter Mentions of this Site: uses BackTweets to show recent mentions of the site on Twitter

Blog Mentions of this Site: uses SocialMention to show recent mentions of the site on blogs